Musings, reflections and collections
on Buddhism, psychology and life.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

News from volunteers

Got an email this morning from one of our Amida volunteers, Tam.What an extraordinary week! My learning curve has been pushed so hard and reached such new levels that it's no longer a curve but a bullet straight line reaching up several hundred metres onto the air. Okay, occasionally it has a few wobbles and wiggles, and even crumples up into a little heap on the floor and goes "I don't know what I'm doing, HELP!" But essentially it's keeping straight and true, and being added to every minute. I've even started to learn just a smidgen about the science of the English language. That's the toughest part for me (and for many of the other volunteers with no official teacher training/TEFL as we're from the generation that never had to learn "this is a noun, this is a pronoun, this is the past participial tense".) Fortunately I don't need to worry too much, since in grammar classes I play assistant to the more experienced teachers, and my strengths are more in guiding discussions in conversation classes, and bouncing about doing nursery rhymes with the little 'uns. Also I will be doing movement and song and drama and art stuff when I go down to Tamil Nadu on Wednesday, as those Tsunami orphans need learning through fun and relaxation and gentleness more than anything else by the sound of things Tam writes on the Amida volunteers blog site